Leviathan's Blood (50 page)

‘Some of it is true, in so far as the people themselves believe. Others are not so true.’ Aelyn followed her into the kitchen, still dominated by its long table. ‘We have not
found her, though. Even Eidan cannot find a trace of her in the stones.’

Ayae pulled back the heavy chair she had brought from downstairs and sat down. ‘How do you explain it, then?’

‘I do not. I cannot.’ The Keeper pulled a lighter chair out to sit upon and spread her hands out. ‘However, if we move up the coast with our navy, if we take Leera at its ports
and shut down her supply routes, she will appear. In all her fury, she will appear in a country that is not the one I have worked so hard to create.’

She sounded tired and defeated and Ayae did not know how to respond to what she said.

‘The rain must have come in during the storm,’ Aelyn said, looking at the damp patches that remained on the stone floor. ‘I do apologize. Faje warned me that he had been only
able to do a minor repair.’

‘I did not realize it was you who came here,’ Ayae said, caught off-guard. ‘Thank you.’

‘It was Faje, mostly. My brothers can be kind in their own fashion, but they are terrible men to know in times of grief. They believe you must stare into it. That it makes you stronger
when you meet it directly. There is an element of truth to such thoughts but it is what they first said when they were at war. I do not think that they ever truly left that mentality.’ Aelyn
fell silent for a moment, the stillness that was around her feeling as if it trembled, just slightly. ‘No one is sure where Benan Le’ta is at the moment,’ she said, leaving the
topic. ‘In the confusion of Xeq and the trial, he must have slipped out of Yeflam. At the moment, I am quite happy to believe that. It may interest you to know that the Traders’ Union
is going to compensate those who lost their homes or loved ones, in order to keep the peace as we go to war with Leera.’

Ayae ran a heavy hand through her hair. ‘I am happy to help anyone innocent who was hurt,’ she said, finally.

‘There are no innocents.’ She might have said
on Xeq
, but she did not. ‘People make their choices – do not forget that.’

‘I merely meant that I will not hide from what happened.’

‘You speak as if you have a choice in the matter.’ Aelyn’s second smile was no longer empty, but rather sad and, Ayae thought, lonely. ‘Not so long ago, you were probably
like so many others in this word. An event befalls them, and they blame someone in authority above them. They say that they could have done this or they could have done that. They say that if they
had more money it would be different. If they had more authority, more opportunity, then it would also be different. But for people like you and me, there is no alternative outcome. There is no
authority to turn towards. We are it. We are the highest power in the world and we can do nothing but take responsibility for what we do.’

‘But the child—’

‘—is but us, until she is not.’ Her smile faded. ‘If we are to take what was said at the trial as a truth – and bear in mind that I think it will be a long time
before we can say that – little has changed. We are still striving to make the world whole again. We are still recovering from the War of the Gods. We are not still in it, as my brothers
would suggest. Indeed, my great fear is that thoughts like that only begin a cycle for what will happen when others reach this point, when beings like you and me become gods. When we begin to
transcend ourselves and become divine, we cannot be at war.’

Ayae had no answer, but she knew that she did not need one. The conversation was not for her alone. They were Aelyn Meah’s words to Aelyn Meah, Keeper of the Divine, ruler of Yeflam, and
they were in part an attempt to ease her conscience that she and the Enclave were heading in the right direction. While she might have always thought war was inevitable, Ayae could see that the way
in which it was unfolding was not the way Aelyn had wished it, and her words sounded much more like a practised speech aimed at regaining the confidence of her Keepers.

For a short time longer, the two talked in this fashion, about subjects otherwise unspoken, about a confession of fears Aelyn could not begin to make, until the Keeper finished.

At the door, the Keeper stopped. ‘Are you sure you will not consider coming to the announcement?’ she asked. ‘It is important for you as well.’

‘I am sorry,’ Ayae told her. ‘But I would not trust myself there.’

In the darkness, the finished graves held a terrible promise that Bueralan could not turn from. For the last week, he had slept poorly, the exhaustion of physical labour
providing only snatches of rest and, when he awoke, he would inevitably find himself drawn to the graves. In the early hours of the morning, the mounds of dirt were lit by the moon and the stars,
and he would wrap his hand about the leather pouch around his neck until the cold began to burn his skin. Then, he would release it, and the familiar chill would settle against his chest.

On the third night after the graves had been finished, Bueralan realized that a part of him came out expecting to bury Zean’s soul.

Aela Ren had appeared before them on the fourth day, after the last grave had been filled. ‘It is a strange ritual we keep without the gods,’ he said, walking between the mounds of
earth. ‘Originally, we buried our dead so that the Wanderer would know where our souls were. He was but one of the aspects of mortality, and when he requested that the dead were buried, he
also asked for Maika, the God of Ascension, Maiza, the God of Oblivion, and for Maita, the Goddess of Rebirth. It was she who used the soil most of all, for she ensured that a soul’s return
to human life was one of steps, and it began in the soil, in the worms that ate human flesh. It has often amazed me that only the butterflies in Ooila rise after falling into the ground where the
traces of Maita’s power give them life again and again.’

‘Occasionally people arise,’ Samuel Orlan replied. Of the three, the old cartographer was the only one who felt comfortable entering into conversation with the Innocent. ‘They
are in a terrible state, half-decayed, their mind gone, but they do arise.’

‘You have seen such?’

‘Yes,’ Orlan said sadly. ‘I have.’

‘Then why do you dig graves?’

‘I do not, usually.’

Bueralan remembered the pyres in Mireea and the intricate images that had filled all but two of them, but he made no attempt to intervene. Ren baited Orlan in each exchange the two had, and the
latter would reply only in earnest, as if a strange, unspoken debate was taking place.

A light crunch of gravel sounded behind Bueralan and he smelt a mixture of soap and perfume before Taela stood next to him.

‘You’re supposed to be asleep,’ he said.

‘So are you.’

After the first day of grave digging, she had returned to speaking to him. Bueralan had tried to keep his distance, but had found himself drawn back to her, to her conversation, to her insight,
and to the fact that, in the house that held four people, only Taela shared his experience of being caught in something much larger than themselves.

‘Have you decided to bury it yet?’ she asked.

He could still feel the cold in his hand from the pouch at his neck. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I see Ren stare at it each time I enter a room. He would dig it up if I buried
it.’

‘It is a talisman to him.’

Bueralan did not disagree. Each time he spoke with the Innocent, the scarred man would begin to speak of the War of the Gods. He would describe the world that had existed at that time, quite
often in language that surprised Bueralan. He would see images in his mind, similar to the image he had seen of Jae’le, the Animal Lord. Each of them had a sweetness, a perfection to them, a
sureness that Bueralan found comforting, and he had come to realize that Aela Ren was trying to convince him of his position, as if, by doing so, he might draw a name from him.

‘What was she like,’ Taela asked, ‘this child god?’

‘Cruel,’ he spoke the word without pause. ‘Young and cruel.’

‘I used to pull off the wings of butterflies when I was a girl,’ she said. ‘I would catch them in a net that my father owned and I would cut off their wings, to see if they
would be reborn without them.’

‘And were they?’

‘No, they were reborn with wings. But it was cruel of me – children are often cruel, I have found.’

‘I do not think she is truly a child, not in the way you and I understand it,’ Bueralan said. ‘I had not given her much thought until this week. For the most part, I was
interested in making amends for my failure. I had lost my friends, and I had lost my life. To hold Zean’s soul in my hand after that . . . it was too much like when we were children. I was
not given nets to catch butterflies, but a boy to wear all my punishments, and I did not want that authority. It was a burden that I could not bear.’

‘You sound very similar to the Queen,’ she said quietly. ‘Years ago she showed me the books that she had written. They were difficult to read, filled with violence, and advice,
and instructions, all with the aim of building a world power out of Ooila. At the end of my reading, she told me that the words in those books were a burden she felt every day of the year. She
placed a cup in front of me as she spoke. It was filled with poison, she said. I would have the option to drink it after she told me a secret. I was not very old: the Queen had purchased me from
the opera that my father had sold me to the year before, and the secrets I knew to keep were awful. But it was there that she told me that none of her children were the reincarnations of the women
in the books. That her children were her own. That she herself would not be reborn.’

Bueralan wondered if his mother had known. He thought that she had. He thought of Safeen Re, whom he had seen last week, and her advice, and he thought lastly of the Hundredth Prince.

‘I could laugh,’ he said. ‘Almost.’

‘Yes,’ Taela said after a moment of hesitation. ‘I suppose you could.’

Zean would laugh.
The cold in Bueralan’s hand had almost faded, and he resisted the urge to reach up again for the pouch. It was strange that he barely felt the leather against
his chest. He had grown used to it, just as he had grown used to the strip around his neck, and the weight at the end. The burden that he could not at first bear was now a burden, he knew, that he
had learned to bear. He had finally begun to understand that, standing before the graves he had dug.

When the second knock came on the door, Ayae considered ignoring it.

Yet, it persisted, a heavy soldier’s knock.
A soldier dressed as a priest –
but she pushed the thought from her mind as it started. Memories of Faise and Zineer were never
far from Ayae in their house. A cup she held. A door she opened. The rumpled, unmade bed she saw from the hallway. She could see the faint outlines of both, performing the acts that they had done
when alive. Walking down stairs. Standing before the kitchen window. Ayae had navigated the memories from the moment she pushed open the door and found the bloodstains, but not the bodies. Still,
when the knock sounded again, she resisted the idea of rising because it did remind her of that night, and a part of her wished that she had not answered it then. She would have been in the house
when the window broke, would have heard Faise’s scream. Would have heard Zineer’s shout. She would have been there. She would have, had not the false priest knocked on the door.

After the fourth knock, Ayae opened the door. There, Caeli leant casually with her long back against the frame. Her gaze was on the dark street and she had been knocking with her right hand, a
series of heavy raps that did not even require an upraised arm and, when the door fell back, the fist she had held spread into an open palm and gave half a wave.

‘You bring a drink?’ Ayae asked.

Wordlessly, Caeli’s left hand lifted a clear bottle.

‘Is that laq?’

‘I used not to think much of it.’ She pushed herself off the wall. ‘But Lady Wagan has a real taste for it. It has rubbed off on me.’

Ayae closed the door behind the guard. She had not seen Caeli or Lady Wagan since the trial, but she had not looked, either. After the storm had broken and she had gone out in search of a new
door and frame, she had overheard two men discussing the fact that the Lady of the Ghosts had not returned to Wila. The words had been startling, and she had felt something deep inside her curl in
anger, but the men’s conversation had no real depth. One of them had spat regularly on the side of the road as he talked and the other smoked a badly rolled cigarette. Both agreed that
nothing would come from keeping the Mireean refugees now. Send them away, they said. Push them into the ocean, another said. They’d drown their children first, the other said, and the pair
had laughed at a private joke. It had left Ayae feeling combative, though she had said nothing.

Caeli, she knew, would not have reacted in that way. The tall guard wore a thick leather vest, leather trousers and solid leather boots. None of it was new, not even the chain mail that threaded
over the sleeves around her wrists and forearms, and which was hinted at around her shoulders and hips. But it was the long sword by her side that would have led her reply to the two men.

‘I was here earlier,’ she said, approaching the kitchen table, and the same chair that Aelyn had sat at. ‘But I waited.’

‘Thank you.’

Caeli placed the bottle on the table. ‘Glasses?’ She began to unbuckle her sword. ‘I imagine the head of the Keepers came to tell you about the response to the
child?’

The glasses were the ones she had drunk from with Faise, weeks ago. ‘Yes,’ Ayae said, returning. ‘It isn’t a surprise, surely?’

‘No, the cities are alive with it. You can sense it in the papers, but it’s worse when you talk to people. They fear her, they see her, they want her dead. The curfew still exists,
the guard and navy are out. But it is near impossible to walk through parts of this city without overhearing someone talk about it,’ the guard said. ‘It has been hard to hide Lady
Wagan, but Sinae Al’tor has been very good at that.’